There were 150 people on board the Germanwings flight that crashed today in the Alps.
Photograph: Alamy

The rate of aircraft accidents is at a historical low, despite the series of high profile crashes in recent years that have seen a rise in the number of fatalities.

Figures from the Bureau of Aircraft Accident Archives (BAAA) make the Germanwings crash in the Alps the 17th such incident in 2015 compared to 33 that occurred up to the same point in 2014.

It also takes the total number of fatalities for 2015 so far at 247, which assumes the 150 on board today’s Germanwings crash have all died.

In 2014, the BAAA say 1,328 died in aircraft accidents - the highest annual fatality figure since 2005 due to a series of crashes including AirAsia flight QZ8501 and the downing of MH17 in Ukraine . The organisation counts military transport planes and any aircraft capable of carrying six or more passengers.

Using annual aircraft departure figures collated by the World Bank and the International Civil Aviation Organization, we can calculate the rough accident and fatality rate per million departures for the BAAA and ASN (with AirAsia added) figures up to 2014. I say rough as the coverage of countries in the World Bank dataset varies from year to year.

This is consistent with fewer accidents but the crashes that did happen in 2014 were particularly severe in terms of lives lost. This is especially apparent when you look at the ratio of fatalities to accidents: